Page 160 - Deep Learning

Creative Insight Writ Large 143

complete a creative project, a single impasse is sufficient to hold up a project
of any complexity. This is a consequence of hierarchical organization. If a sub-
goal cannot be obtained, then its superordinate goal cannot be obtained, so its
superordinate goal is unreachable, and so on, up to the top goal.
In his classic tale of underwater exploration, The Silent World, Jacques-Yues
Cousteau describes the invention of the SCUBA diving equipment that is now
used by millions of recreational and professional divers. Spear fishers along
28
the Mediterranean coast had invented the rubber fins, the mask and the snorkel
in the 1930s, but they had not invented a lightweight breathing apparatus that
allowed them to stay down longer than the time they could hold their breath.
Experiments that nearly killed him convinced Cousteau that carrying compressed
air in a tank on his back was safer than breathing through a hose connected to a
compressor on the surface. The problem was that a diver’s depth varies through-
out a dive. If the tank feeds air to the diver at too low a pressure, the water pres-
sure will squeeze him, and if it delivers air at too high a pressure, precious air
is wasted in bubbles. The subgoal of delivering the air at just the right pressure
held up the development of a practical device, which in turn was the key to the
program of underwater exploration that eventually became Cousteau’s lifelong
project. The adaptation of a valve originally developed to feed household gas to
car engines during the gasoline shortage of World War II resolved this impasse.
The adaptation was simple in engineering terms, but because it was a subgoal at
the bottom of a high stack of superordinate goals, it had major consequences for
recreational and professional diving, marine biology, the tourist industry and, let
us not forget, popular television. Although a single clever idea seldom suffices to
produce a significant novelty, a single impasse suffices to hold up its production,
creating a slowdown that is visible at the higher scale. Impasses punch through
to directly impact significant creative projects.
A second mechanism that contributes to alterations in mode and tempo
at the significant time band is that insights are unlikely to appear at even inter-
vals; there is no mechanism to ensure that they do. If impasses are massively
contingent on the details of what a person knows and how that knowledge
is organized, they are more likely to appear at random intervals. The time it
takes to resolve any one impasse is also a random variable, massively contin-
gent on the details of each particular instance. Consequently, impasses and
their associated insights are likely to form clusters in time. Viewed from the
perspective of a project as a whole, a temporal cluster of impasses, each of
which requires a lengthy effort to resolve, will appear at higher system levels
as a mega-impasse, a period during which progress was slower than average.
In contrast, a cluster of quickly resolved impasses will appear at the higher